White House Faced with Increasingly Likely Prospect that Assad Will Violate Deal

WASHINGTON -- The White House tried to hold on to hope this week as its Syrian disarmament strategy falls apart, with Secretary of State John Kerry admitting Friday that the U.S. is leaning on Russia to urge Bashar al-Assad to come into compliance with Washington's "red line" deal.

Less than 5 percent of the priority 1 chemical weapons in Assad's stockpile, including agents like the nerve gas sarin, have been removed from the country and the regime appears to be making no effort to liquidate the rest as agreed.

That just includes chemical agents that the U.S. knows about, and wouldn't include stockpiles that may have been scuttled off to Hezbollah or Iran for safekeeping as Assad negotiated a deal to avoid U.S. "red line" strikes.

"The international community is poised and ready to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons as soon as the chemicals have reached the Syrian Port of Latakia. It is the Assad regime’s responsibility to transport the chemicals to Latakia safely to facilitate their removal. And we expect them to meet their obligation to do so," White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters.

"We all know the Syrian regime has the capability to move these weapons. We know that because they’ve been moved multiple times before, during the conflict. …So we’re going to continue to work with our partners on this to keep up the pressure on the Assad regime and to support the OPCW-U.N. joint mission’s operations."

Carney quoted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as saying, “The Syrian Arab Republic has sufficient material and equipment necessary to carry out multiple ground movements to ensure the expeditious removal of chemical weapons material, and that it is imperative that Syria intensifies its efforts to expedite in-country movements of chemical weapons and continues to meet its obligations."

"Well, again, they have obligation here. They have committed to doing this. This is a regime that refused to acknowledge that it possessed chemical weapons until a very short time ago and has now committed to not only acknowledging that it possesses the weapons, but moving them so they can be destroyed," he said. "And the United States and our partners in this effort will insist that Syria meet its commitments."

A senior administration official on a State Department conference call with reporters Friday said he wasn't in the room with U.S. and Syrian negotiators at peace talks this past week, but "I have never heard that the chemical weapons issues came up in any serious way during this week of talks here in Geneva."

"I don’t know that the chemical weapons issue darkened the talks here, but there is a credibility issue for the Syrian government, whether it be with respect to chemical weapons, and whether or not it would implement any deal that was ever reached here in Geneva, if we do get to a deal," the official said.

"Right now we’re trying to see if the Syrian government will actually lock on and, through serious messages from the international community, begin to move the material. But of course, there is a Security Council resolution and there are references in that resolution to what would happen were the Syrian government not to comply with the Security Council resolutions requirements. So that resolution is in place. And ultimately if we have to go down that route, we’ll go down that route."